The Making of Vince Li 2.0: The Unmaking of Canada

John Carpenter’s classic ‘Halloween’ is an independent horror film produced on a shoestring budget in the unlikely year 1978. Written in 10 days and shot in just 20 days, the film follows in the extreme footsteps of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’, while pioneering many characteristically unique plot twists (such as the concept of the killer dying and coming back to life again within the same film). Halloween went on to become one of the most widely imitated films of the slasher genre. The basic plotline of Halloween is as follows:

On Halloween night of 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois, 6-year-old Michael Myers, dressed in a clown costume and mask, [inexplicably] kills his older sister Judith with a kitchen knife at his home and is subsequently arrested, knife in hand. [Years later], on October 30, 1978, the now 21-year-old Michael (Nick Castle) escapes Smith’s Grove Sanitarium (where he had been committed after the murder), and steals a car that was to take him to court. Along the way, he kills a mechanic and takes his uniform overalls. He drives home to Haddonfield and steals a white [Shatner] mask from a local store. [1]

The maniac proceeds to terrorize Haddonfield, and much gibbitude ensues as Myers, now a giant of a man in black mechanic’s coveralls and expressionless white mask, embraces his destiny as a murderer of multitudes. Attempting to thwart Michael Myer’s extravaganza of mass murder is Dr. Sam Loomis (played by Donald Pleasence), Myer’s former psychiatrist.

Loomis, it seems, has struggled for years to keep Myers locked away, and anticipates Michael’s return home after his escape, suspecting his terrible intentions. In one scene Dr. Loomis reveals that he has worked arduously on Myers rehabilitation but has ultimately resigned himself to what Michael Myer’s really is. In a revealing discussion with the town Sheriff, Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), Loomis explains his medical conclusion after years of working with Myers:

LOOMIS

(continuing, looks at Brackett)

I suppose I do seem a bit sinister for a doctor.

BRACKETT

Looks like to me you’re just plain scared.

LOOMIS

I am. (he glances around the bedroom)

I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no conscience, no reason, no understanding, in even the most rudimentary sense, of life or death or right or wrong. I met this six-year-old boy with a blank, cold emotionless face and the blackest of eyes, the devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and another seven trying to keep him locked away when I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely, simply evil. [2]

Dr. Loomis is the only character in the film who fully understands the real extent of Michael Myers’ departure from humanity. Several times throughout the movie, futilely, he attempts to express in words to others the grounds for his dreadful urgency. Predictably, as in most horror movies, others fail to grasp the truth or the seriousness of the situation. It becomes clear that nobody, including Loomis’ medical peers, fully comprehend what they are dealing with.

Everybody underestimates the extent of Myer’s radical mental divergence, leading to his mishandling and his eventual escape. Loomis consequently carries the reputation of a fanatic, of a crackpot and it is implied that he has lost his professional critical perspective; having made Michael Myer’s his obsession. As the story spirals out of control and ever more people succumb to Myer’s relentless mania, Loomis seems the only voice of reason, the only man who is able to comprehend his nemesis’ dispassionate motivation.

What makes Halloween such a horrifying film is the nightmarish quality of predictable inevitability. As in dreams, spectators can see where the simple story is leading, with maddeningly slow relentlessness, but nobody seems capable of putting a stop to it. Most of the characters, starting with the staff at the lunatic asylum, make successive bad decisions and thereby serve as enablers (and eventual victims) of Myer’s maniacal objectives. As in a nightmare, the characters in Halloween seem entrenched in their unremarkable lives and are oblivious to the impending doom that (sometimes literally) stands before them. In the end, everything happens as surely as if nobody had attempted to prevent it at all.

Characters like Dr. Loomis and Sheriff Brackett attempt to avert the madman’s efforts, and later to minimize the body count, but nobody is capable of stopping Myers’ singular ruthlessness from coming to fruition. The character of Dr. Loomis throughout the movie, like Pandora in Greek mythology, is doomed to see and predict the future, but unable to stop it from unfolding. Despite his detailed knowledge of the patient, years of research, and his acceptance of Myer’s sociopathic detachment, Dr. Loomis is as helpless to stop Myers as all the other dimwitted supporting characters.

Reading the paper on Feb. 10th, 2017 I think I may empathize with how Dr. Loomis might have felt. Having written about the Winnipeg bus decapitator Vince Li twice before [3][4], I feel like a front row spectator in a waking horror movie. Much like the film Halloween, the story of Vince Li is has all the terrible trappings, the inevitable predictability and the successive bad decisions of horror fiction, along with the potentially still growing list of victims. The terrible wake of Vince Li parallels that of Michael Myers, complete with a dismembered human being, ineffectual police corporals, shattered families and tortured minds. The future of Vince Li has yet to be written, but will undoubtedly result in a similar terrible conclusion.

However, the story of Vince Li, unlike that of Myers, contains so many more visceral horrors preceding his emancipation than Myers’ prior to escape. Mike Myers unlike Vince Li, at no time ate his victim’s eyes. He never beheaded a man or waved it around like a trophy before dozens of spectators (many of whom suffer today with legitimate P.T.S.D. and one, in particular, who went on to kill himself for his own frailty.) Myers at no time cut off a man’s ear, nose and tongue or shoved them in his pockets. Myers never ate a man’s heart or cannibalized his victims. And, most crucially, Myers was never willfully set free into the community as his clinicians clapped each other on the back and congratulated each other on a successful treatment, another satisfied customer.

Like a horror film’s rising action, Vince Li is now a free man, as many predicted some time ago. Having been deemed ‘not criminally responsible’ by a Manitoba Criminal Code Review Board for the gruesome beheading of Timothy Mclean, Vince Li gets a fresh start in the community and a new lease on life. The board “is of the opinion that the weight of evidence does not substantiate that Mr. Baker poses a significant threat to the safety of the public,” the written decision reads in part.[5] He even gets a new, congenial sounding name: “Will Lee Baker” he is now called, due in part to his handler’s fears of retaliation for their absurd charade. They couldn’t have found him a more innocuous sounding name if they’d gone with Billy Bob Smith.

Vince Li, or William Lee Baker (let’s call his new incarnation ‘Willy’ for the sake of simplicity), having spent the past 9 years in the maximum security Selkirk Mental Health Centre, has been deemed fit for unconditional discharge. That is to say, he will now walk free, with no restrictions, no ankle bracelet transmitter, no live-in caregiver and no routine check-ups. He requires no follow-up with his treatment team, because, allegedly, he’s completely cured. As Tim Brodbeck summarized in his article on Feb 11th, 2017, ‘Review board commits travesty of justice’,

Are there any assurances whatsoever that Baker’s doctors, advocates—the state – will ensure he’s taking his meds not just today but in five, 10, 15 years from now? Nope. Baker received an absolute discharge. He’s free to do whatever he wants. Take his meds, not take his meds, move out of the province or even out of the country. [6]

During his incarceration, Vince Li was branded a ‘model patient’ and responded splendidly to his colourful regiment of drugs. Chris Summerville, chief executive officer of the Schizophrenic Society of Canada, is quoted as saying “Li has been a model patient who is soft-spoken, humble, remorseful for what he did and determined to stay on his schizophrenia medication. Summerville, who visits Li regularly in Selkirk, said Li deserves a chance to get on with his life” [7].

It’s as if the brutal murder of Timothy McLean never happened, it’s a memory, completely absolved. Willy is such a humble, gentle man, with a heart of gold, we’re told. No more annual reviews by criminal review boards, nobody holding his mouth and nose shut to ensure he swallows his medications, no more interviews with sympathetic, head-nodding Neo-Freudian quacks. But Summerville understands his ‘model’ patient best, believes in him and is willing to stake his reputation on him, and he wants us to believe too.

This same man, Vince Li, let us remember, refused treatment In September 2005 (years before beheading McLean) after announcing his disbelief in western medicine. He is a man who declined to acknowledge his mental illness in the past, ignoring the advice of his wife (a woman referred to only as “Ana” in court documents), friends and parents, and who went on to wander down Toronto highway 427 in a fugue state before being arrested and admitted to a psychiatric facility under a form. He then strolled out the revolving door of a mental institution without resistance and willfully stopped taking his prescribed medication.

Let me reiterate: he refused treatment and left against the advice of a so-called doctor. He was prescribed medication for his condition, but deliberately decided not to take it. What will happen next is both predictable and inevitable. History repeats itself, it is said, and certainly will in this case.

Willy Baker will undoubtedly return to Haddonfield, er… Winnipeg, and will take up his old lifestyle in his apartment (conveniently situated not far from Tim McLean’s mother, Carol de Delley) without restriction. For awhile he will surely coast without incident. He’ll swallow his pills and ride the gravy train of social assistance, living a North American lifestyle courtesy of Canadian tax payers. Why work when you can soak up AISH payments? A free ride was likely why he came to Canada in the first place. He’ll go to the movies and hang around bubble tea café’s, trying to assume an heir of normalcy, despite the fact that he is anything but, suffering from a rarely seen severe form of schizophrenia.

And then, for whatever reason, things will gradually start to fall apart. He’ll begin to miss his ex-wife ‘Ana’ and his native China and won’t have the company of quacks fussing over him or spooning ice-cream into his face on a daily basis. He’ll fall into a deep depression once more and surely begin his inevitable slide down the spiral. Without meaningful work he’ll have nothing to occupy his idle hands and will probably stop eating, as he often has before.

And so it goes. Maybe his prescription will expire and he’ll forget to take his pills. Maybe this will coincide with a stat holiday and he’ll be forced to wait for a prescription refill. Or maybe the pills will simply lose their efficacy and he won’t even bother to notice or seek assistance. Willy Baker will start down that long winding road of recidivism and God will take up his leash again, “guiding him”, whispering that an alien threat is imminent. July 30th will approach, like Halloween night, and before long his brain will begin to short circuit badly. He’ll sell his computer, buy another huge ‘bowie style knife’ and purchase a bus ticket to nowhere. Vince Li 2.0, will get down to business killing brutally once again. And the real life horror movie will roll on, all made possible by the so-called professionals, by social progressives and by societal apathy.

Every element of the Vince Li farce seems to have been neatly choreographed, doesn’t it? Every step of his rehab carefully scripted and presented by the media as a small step for man. From his years spent in hospital to his eventual transfer to a group home to his unsupervised sojourns into the public, Vince Li’s ‘recovery’ has painted him as a victim, as an accidental tourist in the realm of insanity.

We are witnessing the evolution of mental illness, the assimilation of mental infirmity into the definition of normalcy, all made possible by the efforts of social reformers. It’s only a small part of a pervasive socialist experiment being conducted by the mental health franchise, by the media, by big government, and even bigger pharmaceuticals; it’s part of a Zeitgeist of moral decay. It reeks of corruption, the zersetzen (corrosion) of our moral societal foundations and the fabric of family values.

The psychiatrists and psychologists, the weak-headed liberals and the moral relativists want so desperately for society to believe that mental illness absolves a man of his behaviour, that morality is unrelated to psychological malfunction and that a disconnect exists between the hands and the mind of a mentally ill person. They hope desperately for the public at large to place their faith in powerful anti-psychotic medications and in new, ever less invasive therapies. Gone are the electric shock treatments, the sanitariums, the straight jackets and the lobotomy that Vince Li so richly deserves.

So too they would have us subscribe to human models that are ever more disgraceful. They would have us believe that mental disorders excuse a cannibal murderer of his misdeeds, pardon the pedophile from his unclean urges, and absolve the transsexual from his “gender identity” confusion. They urge the perception that it’s all somehow ‘normal’, when it’s anything but, encouraging everyone to tolerate what they innately know to be wrong.

Our government urges us to accept the mentally ill, knowing their very presence fractures our communities ever further. These people increase the pressure on an already faltering health care system, on our struggling, insubstantial law enforcement agencies and the burgeoning social welfare institutions.

So often nowadays, we see gibbering, mentally ill people lurching around in public, drifting on public transit or throwing fits in shopping malls. Even our workplaces and the schools we send our children to are no longer sacrosanct. It’s all part of the beloved inclusion model that posits being around regular people will help the mentally imbalanced to re-acclimatize and ‘fit back in’ to society at large.

The people promoting this know all too well that the opposite is true. They know that not only are many of these people never going to get better, but that in many cases they will actually grow to become worse off. The mentally ill will continue draw upon the resources of others and continue to degrade the lives of everyone, their very existence corroding the lives of those who are well.

In my estimation, speaking succinctly, I view the whole Vince Li horrorshow as a tragic signifier for a much larger problem in the world today. It’s not only a giant leap for pseudo science and the poorly-veiled socialist reconstruction of our value systems, but also yet another massive leveling down of societal standards. If we are willing to accept an immigrant cannibal murderer among us, to tolerate such a man wandering unchecked after what he has done, we clearly will stoop to almost anything as a people. This man belongs at the bottom of a dumpster, in a sanitarium sub-basement, or hanging from a public gallows, not living a life of ease under an alias among innocent, unsuspecting people. The Vince Li story illustrates that the stops of morality are truly now pulled, that anything can and will masquerade as normalcy in this insane, sick place called Canada.

One comment on “The Making of Vince Li 2.0: The Unmaking of Canada”

Yes, indeed…..and as the streets continue to embrace this culture of moral decay and inherent danger………the law abiding, the elderly, women and children, will find comfort in staying at home…..behind locked doors…..unarmed….making their home their escape from the reality that is kept at bay by a locked storm door and a dead bolt……
What more could Big Government ask for?